They walked home by the lakeside way, and out upon the water those gay paper lanterns, flashing, fleeting, and careering, sang to them, sang a chorus of red and violet, and green and gold; a song of mystic bands of the future. One day, when business paused during a dull sultry afternoon, Stimson went up town. Upon his return, he found that the popcorn man, from his stand over in a corner, was keeping an eye upon the cashier's cage, and that nobody at all was attending to the wooden arm and the iron rings. He strode forward like a sergeant of grenadiers. "Where in thunder is Lizzie?" he demanded, a cloud of rage in his eyes. The popcorn man, although associated long with Stimson, had never got over being dazed. "They've--they've--gone round to th'--th'--house," he said with difficulty, as if he had just been stunned. "Whose house?" snapped Stimson. "Your--your house, I s'pose," said the popcorn man. Stimson marched round to his home. Kingly denunciations surged, already formulated, to the tip of his tongue, and he bided the moment when his anger could fall upon the heads of that pair of children. He found his wife convulsive and in tears. "Where's Lizzie?" And then she burst forth--"Oh--John--John--they've run away, I know they have. They drove by here not three minutes ago. They must have done it on purpose to bid me good-bye, for Lizzie waved her hand sadlike; and then, before I could get out to ask where they were going or what, Frank whipped up the horse." Stimson gave vent to a dreadful roar. "Get my revolver--get a hack--get my revolver, do you hear--what the devil--" His voice became incoherent. He had always ordered his wife about as if she were a battalion of infantry, and despite her misery, the training of years forced her to spring mechanically to obey; but suddenly she turned to him with a shrill appeal. "Oh, John--not--the--revolver." "Confound it, let go of me!" he roared again, and shook her from him. He ran hatless upon the street. There were a multitude of hacks at the summer resort, but it was ages to him before he could find one. Then he charged it like a bull. "Uptown!" he yelled, as he tumbled into the rear seat. The hackman thought of severed arteries. His galloping horse distanced a large number of citizens who had been running to find what caused such contortions by the little hatless man. It chanced as the bouncing hack went along near the lake, Stimson gazed across the calm grey expanse and recognized a color in a bonnet and a pose of a head. A buggy was traveling along a highway that led to Sorington. Stimson bellowed--"There--there--there they are--in that buggy."